AUNTY!
AFRICAN WOMEN IN THE FRAME, 1870 TO THE PRESENT Selections from THE MCKINLEY COLLECTION Curated by CATHERINE E. MCKINLEY & LAYLAH AMATULLAH BARRAYN Aunty! is a unique collaboration between Catherine E. McKinley, a writer and collector, and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, a photographer and curator, both Black women, presenting works where the subjects of the collection are women. Aunty! features over a hundred rare and original images, ranging from portraiture to stereographs, postcards to cartes de visite, taken as early as 1870 and as recently as 2013. Photographers include European and African colonial male owned studios—named and unnamed—and celebrated contemporary African female artists, spanning more than 143 years of the the colonial and post-colonial eras. This exhibition takes up the idea and figure of “Aunty” and the nuances of this naming. At once an expression of love and affection, Aunty is an honorific across most Black world cultures—a recognition of a feminine power rooted in indigeneity. As powerfully, it connotes the violence of the original colonial construction of the word: the corporeal, dark, servile figure, buffoonish or sexualized in her role of colonial servant. It is also a name burdened by African and Diaspora grapplings with gender, and often troubling constructions of motherhood, sexuality, etc. This exhibition looks at Auntys through the troubling lens of colonialism by including a few earlier photographic images of the late 1870s, as well as the colonial and postcolonial lens of African male photographers, through vernacular images of post-Independence partygoers and studio sittings, and contemporary renderings. For McKinley and Barrayn, Aunty! is an attempt to look head on at the beauty of the images and also their more often discomfiting legacies, and the moments where the subjects look back at the viewer reassuringly, with a sense of control of her image, and pleasure in herself.
November 15, 2018 – January 31, 2019 Opening Reception: Thursday November 15, 6–9pm